The Word is Very Near You: Feasts and Festivals: A Guide to Preaching the Lectionary

By John Pridmore

For the many thousands who prepare sermons on the lectionary readings each week, here are expert, wise and extremely down to earth reflections to inspire and guide you, from an outstanding preacher and Church Times columnist. A companion to the main volume, this second book covers all the principal feasts and festivals that do not fall on Sunday.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848253452

Book preview

Introduction

Christians keep Sunday special – at least they are supposed to. Every Sunday is the day of resurrection, not just Easter Day. But there are weekdays too during the year that are important to Christians. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are obvious examples. Then there are the festivals, such as Christmas Day, which only occasionally fall on a Sunday. So it is with the saints’ days. St George’s Day, 23 April, for example, will some years be a Sunday, but most years not. It is good for us to keep the saints’ days special, on whatever day of the week they fall. We are not alone. We belong to the extended family of all the saints, those with us still but those too who rejoice ‘on another shore and in a greater light’. We are surrounded by this ‘great cloud of witnesses’ (Hebrews 12.1) and we are glad to give thanks for them on any day of the week.

The Church of England’s ‘Principal Service Lectionary’ provides readings both for Sundays and also for the festivals which do not – or do not necessarily – fall on a Sunday. In the first volume of The Word is Very Near You (Canterbury Press, 2009) I commented on the lectionary’s three-year cycle of readings for the Sundays of the church year. This slimmer second volume focuses on the church’s high days and holy days that are never on a Sunday or only sometimes on a Sunday. My aim is to explore the themes of these days in the light of the scriptural readings appointed for them.

King Lear, contemplating what he supposed would be indefinite imprisonment with his daughter Cordelia, imagines that they will wile away their time behind bars gossiping about ‘who’s in, who’s out’ at court. The same ‘who’s in, who’s out’ question faced me in having to decide which festivals to include in these pages. Choices had to be made. As an Englishman, I have not presumed to comment on ‘the saints for Ireland, Scotland, and Wales’, although the Church of England lectionary provides readings for their festivals. Because I based these studies on the provisions of the ‘Principal Service Lectionary’, I had to forego commenting on the men and women of God to whom are grudgingly allotted ‘Lesser Festivals’ or mere ‘Commemorations’. Many of these brave and holy people probably mean more to us than those honoured by their red-letter days and a strong case could be made for their promotion to a higher place in the church’s esteem and a more prominent place in its calendar. But that case cannot be made here.

In the end I resolved the ‘who’s in, who’s out’ issue by a simple rule of thumb. The days I mull over are those that are generally observed as ‘principal festivals’ in the Church of England. Rules of thumb, of course, are always rough and ready. It might be felt that there are special days not mentioned here that have as great a claim to be included as those that are discussed. Be that as it may, I am fairly confident that none of the festivals I do consider could lightly have been dropped.

Three explanatory notes are perhaps necessary. First, the lectionary provides three ‘Sets’ of readings which may be used ‘on the evening of Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day’, but it stipulates that ‘Set III

should be used at some service during the celebration’. The passage appointed as the Gospel in the Set III readings is the Prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1.1–14). It is this text above all which compels our attention at Christmas, the attention not least of those who have the unnerving task of expounding it. For this reason, I have based all three Christmas expositions on the Set III readings.

Second, I have taken the opportunity provided by this second series of reflections to include some thoughts on four festivals which are –

necessarily or probably – celebrated on Sundays, but which were not included in the previous volume. These are a Dedication Festival, Bible Sunday, Mothering Sunday and Harvest Thanksgiving.

Third, for the celebration of a Dedication Festival the lectionary provides different readings for years A, B and C. The focus of this festival will usually be on the story of the local church whose dedication is being celebrated. For this reason, I have included just one reflection for this festival, a more general consideration of the role of holy places in the mission of the church.

Many of these pieces were originally published in the Church Times. As I said in the foreword to this book’s predecessor, I am grateful to the deputy editor of the Church Times, Rachel Boulding, for making my comments on the lectionary fit to appear in its pages. My deep gratitude is also due to Christine Smith of Canterbury Press, both for inviting me to prepare these studies for publication in book form and for her patience with my endless tiresome questions.

Again as I acknowledged in the foreword to the earlier book, I owe more than I can say to the encouragement and forbearance of my wife Pat, as I have tried to put into words what often is beyond words.

This book is dedicated to someone who brings to his study of Holy Scripture an immeasurably clearer and more Christian mind than mine. The book would have been much better if he had written it.

John Pridmore

FEASTS AND HOLY DAYS

Christmas Day

25 DECEMBER

Isaiah 52.7–10; Hebrews 1.1–4 (5–12); John 1.1–14

1. THE WORD OF NO FIXED ABODE

‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ We should translate the text literally, though few modern versions have the nerve to do so. ‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.’ The verb John uses sends us back to Old Testament stories of the God who chose to share the itinerant life of his nomadic people. ‘The cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle’ (Exodus 40.34). The reality of camping is rarely as blissful as it seems in prospect or retrospect – I think of a certain sodden field above Morecambe – and the wilderness wanderings of the children of Israel were far from idyllic. Nevertheless those years came to be seen by the people of Israel as the honeymoon period of their relationship with God. That’s how it should be between God and his people, sharing a journey, together under canvas and under the stars. Stephen saw that and said so – ‘The Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands’ – and he was stoned for his pains (Acts 7.48). So there can be no more glorious a promise than Hosea’s, ‘I will make you live in tents again’ (Hosea 12.9).

‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.’ John’s language invites us to have second thoughts about the familiar Christmas stories. Joseph and Mary ‘great with child’ have to make the arduous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. There they must bed down as best they can in the byre, where soon Mary’s child is born. There they are visited by shepherds, whiffy outsiders who are probably no better housed than their sheep. Astrologers from the back of beyond turn up, led on their long safari by a wandering star. While the child is still a toddler they are on the move again, this time to Egypt. As the Victorian matron remarked, ‘How very different from the home life of our dear Queen!’

We speak at Christmas of all that seems bizarre about the birth of Jesus. But if we read these stories again in the light of John’s interpretation of what took place when Christ was born, we find that they say something rather different. The strange circumstances of this child’s birth do not set him apart from those of us who were not born in a cattle trough. On the contrary, they identify him with us. It is precisely our condition that this child is born to share. I am essentially a nomad, even if I have lived for seventy years in the same semi-detached house in Sidcup. Human beings were wandering the earth for tens of thousands of years before they settled in caves and in penthouses costing millions. The security of the roof over our heads is wholly illusory. If God had wanted us to stay in the same place he would have given us roots, not legs.

On Christmas Day we read the first few verses of the letter to the Hebrews. Were there time, we should read the eleventh chapter as well. For the anonymous writer, Christians are those who recognize that they are ‘strangers and foreigners on earth’, that they are Bedouin with no need of buildings. So it was for Abraham who ‘set out not knowing where he was going’. So it was for all those who looked for Christ’s day but who did not live to see it. So it is for us who, surrounded by these witnesses, try to follow their example. Whatever our address, we are a people with no permanent home. That ‘homelessness’, so far from depriving us of our humanity, constitutes it. We may be on the road for a long time yet, so we must ‘lay aside every weight’ (Hebrews 12.1) – surely a text for the day in the year when we put so much more weight on.

When we read that ‘the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Luke 9.58) we may feel sorry for him. If so, we miss the point. (As does the weepy carol, ‘Thou didst leave thy throne and thy kingly crown when thou camest to earth for me.’) The famous text is not there to arouse our pity. Beneath Luke’s haunting words is the same Christmas truth taught by John, that the boy born in a byre shares the essential vulnerability and insecurity of our human condition, however swanky are the houses we like to think are ours. In two miraculous lines Henry Vaughan goes to the heart of the Christmas story:

He travels to be born, and then

Is born to travel more again.

(‘The Nativity’)

An unnecessary footnote. To recognize that, wherever we live, we have ‘no fixed abode’ is no reason for refusing shelter to the homeless. Nor is it a reason to ignore the plight of those, massed in their thousands in our planet’s countless refugee camps, whose ‘tents’ are plastic sheets on sticks.

2. THE STRANGLED TOWN OF BETHLEHEM

What we make of the Bible depends on where we read or hear it. Take the words with which the Prologue of St John’s Gospel comes to its tremendous climax – ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1.14). Supposing we hear these words in an English parish church, as the Gospel at Midnight Mass or as the final reading at a service of lessons and carols. The words may well move us deeply yet still say very little. It is not that they are too familiar. It is that they don’t connect. The great text hangs in the air, echoing high in the nave like the last notes of one of the carols we’ve been singing, but without engaging with the world beyond the church walls. But supposing this Christmas – this Christmas – we go to Bethlehem, to that ‘strangled’ little town as it has been called. Supposing we hear those climactic words in a town now encircled by walls and fences which threaten its very survival as a community. If we stop off in Bethlehem to hear John’s account of the conditions under which our gentle Lord consented to be born, we’ll make the necessary connection. (Online assistance is available for such imaginative journeys. Visit www.openbethlehem.org.)

Bethlehem is suffering what Christ suffered. Charles Wesley – his words more often cited than sung these days – talks of ‘Our God contracted to a span’. For George Herbert, the true light coming into the world was ‘glorious yet contracted light’ (‘Christmas’). It’s all about confinement and contractions. The resonances of such imagery when we’re celebrating the birth of a baby are inescapable. But for the poets, as for John, the emphasis is on the constraints of the incarnation in all its aspects. The Word made flesh is the poet Crashaw’s ‘Eternity shut in a span’ (‘In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord’).

Bethlehem too is ‘shut in a span’. Its imprisonment is iniquitous, but grimly apposite to the events over which our writer broods. The Word becomes flesh. Becoming flesh, he becomes all flesh is heir to. Pious tourists used to tut-tut about the tat marketed in Bethlehem’s Manger Square. They objected to the commercialization of a holy place. But that’s flesh for you. And in the likeness of such ‘sinful flesh’ (Romans 8.3) love came down.

Now the tourists and the tat are almost gone and we redirect our anger. We protest rightly that Bethlehem is being throttled, that the life of a once thriving community is being slowly extinguished. But that too – what stranglers inflict and the strangled suffer – is flesh, the flesh our Lord makes his own. Bethlehem struggles to breathe. It was asphyxia, the commentators tell us, that killed Jesus. The beleaguered little town proves a fitting birthplace for the one who bears